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2019 by Bob Moore and Johannes Houwink ten Cate
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I N 1983, I had been barely one year at my job at Yad Vashem as head of the Righteous Among the Nations Department, when I was approached by Haim Roet. Born in the Netherlands in 1932, he was hidden in several places in the Nieuwlande region (Drenthe province) with the help of Arnold Douwes and his Jewish colleague Max Nico Lons. Douwes had already earned the Yad Vashem honor of Righteous Among the Nations in 1965 and was living in Israel, not far from Tel Aviv. Roet discussed with me the debate in the Yad Vashem Commission for the Righteous with regard to Douwess request to include among the Righteous several hundred Nieuwlande residents who, he claimed, answered his and Lonss call for sheltering Jews during the German occupation of the Netherlands and thus saved their lives. In fact, Douwes had kept notes in a diary during the war years carefully listing all the locations he secretly visited in the Nieuwlande countryside to find places where Jews, coming mainly from Amsterdam, would be afforded safe shelter. These notes were hidden in a secret place, but Douwes was able to recover them after the war. The notes gave the details in coded language, the names and acts of the people in the Nieuwlande region who had aided him in hiding Jews from the Germans. He then insisted that all these rescuers also be accorded the Righteous title. He was quite adamant about it, once going so far as threatening that if these rescuer colleagues of his were not recognized, he would request to have his tree, planted years earlier, removed from Yad Vashem.
Born in 1906, the son of a pastor, Douwes was recruited for the underground by Johannes Post, a farmer and town councilor in the village of Nieuwlande, and immediately dedicated himself to saving Jews. Assisted by Max Lons, a Jew posing as a Protestant, Douwes systematically traversed great stretches of the Nieuwlande countryside on his bicycle, stopping at every house and farm to ask whether they would be willing to lodge a Jewish child. When convincing failed, Douwes was not beyond, in some instances, forcing people to admit Jews for shelter, using all kinds of excuses and addressing the reluctant hosts in their own dialect (which he would take the time to learn). Haim Roet, as an 11-year-old boy, was himself one of the beneficiaries of Douwess help. Fetched by train from Amsterdam to Zwolle, in eastern Holland, and then taken by Douwes on his bicycle to Dedemsvaart, Roet was hidden in several places. Lou Gans, one of Douwess other many beneficiaries, described him in the following glowing terms: You met him. Look in his eyes; look at his tight-lipped face. Then you will understand that no brute in the whole world could resist his will. Did he save 50 Jews, 100, 200, or 500? Heaven knows! He himself could hardly say, because there were so many Jews he helped!
An operation of such magnitude could not go long unnoticed, and the Gestapo was on the lookout for him. To avoid arrest, he changed his appearance, sporting a moustache and wearing a hat and eyeglasses to hide his face as much as possible. Despite all these precautions, Douwes was arrested on October 19, 1944. Luckily for him, while he was imprisoned in the Assen prison, fearing execution or deportation with fatal consequences, the underground rescued him in a daring operation on December 11, 1944. He then went into hiding until the countrys liberation. It is estimated that Douwes was responsible for saving some 350 Jews, including around 100 children. In 1965, Yad Vashem awarded him the title of Righteous Among the Nations.
Subsequently, Douwes championed the cause of honoring many other rescuers in Nieuwlande, but the issue before the Commission for the Righteous in 1983which at the time was headed by Dr. Moshe Bejski, one of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews), and also then a sitting justice on Israels Supreme Courtwas that by the commissions own criteria, each nomination to the Righteous title had to be supported by evidence from the beneficiary partyin other words, the Jewish persons saved by his/her rescuers. In the Nieuwlande case, this was lacking as neither the names of all the people sheltered there nor their current addresses were known. In fact, nearly all the evidence presented was based on Arnold Douwess writings during the war years, save for testimonies from his rescuer colleague Lons and people such as Haim Roet, who had been aided by the Nieuwlande region residents. Would that be sufficient to recognize the several hundred persons as Righteous Among the Nations, as requested by Douwes? There was no precedent for this in the commissions history. At the same time, the cases rapporteur, Dr. Jozeph Michman (formerly Melkman), strongly supported Douwess request, and the commission chairman, Justice Bejski, also leaned in that direction.
In the meantime, Haim Roet sat for hours with me, going over the full names of all those on Douwess list of Nieuwlande rescuers (originally numbering 270, including husbands and wives), to verify their correct full names. Roet also took me on a trip to Douwess home, then at Kiryat Ekron, near Rehovot, to meet the man and clarify certain points in his story. Finally, that same year, after several sessions, the Commission for the Righteous voted to award the Righteous title to 202 of the Nieuwlande rescuers. Ceremonies then took place both at Yad Vashem, where a special commemorative stone was dedicated on which were engraved the names of all the 202 recognized rescuers, and in Nieuwlande, where the community received a specially worded certificate of honor on behalf of Yad Vashem. Upon my request, Arnold Douwes, who in the meantime had moved back to the Netherlands, sent me a copy of his wartime diary, which he had rewritten, and which I kept with me, waiting for an opportunity to have it published. I managed to visit him in Amsterdam, shortly before his passing in 1999. I am presently happy that Douwess longtime wish to have his diary, originally written in Dutch, will appear both in the original Dutch and a new English version in a scholarly project conceived by Professor Bob Moore. Hopefully, it will also one day appear in the Hebrew language, for the benefit of Israeli readers.
I wish also to underline that Nieuwlande was the first large-scale community that was honored by Yad Vashem in toto, coupled with over two hundred individual local rescuers. This created a precedent that made it possible in 1990 to honor a similar community, in France, that rescued many Jews, running into the hundreds and perhaps even more: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. This, too, was in the form of a special certificate that I had the privilege to personally present on behalf of Yad Vashem to the Le Chambon-sur-Lignon community, coupled with honors to individual rescuers of that town and immediate vicinity.
